Where are India's conservative intellectuals?

source

106 highlights

• Although the RSS describes itself as a cultural organisation, it is in fact intensely ideological and deeply political. Its ultimate goal is the construction of a Hindu rashtra, a state run by and for Hindus.

• Rao and Batra’s influence over public policy is based not on their claims to scholarship but on the strength of their links to the RSS.

• Each academic discipline has its own protocols on what constitutes serious scholarship. Historians dig deeply into primary material, whether letters or manuscripts or state documents or court records or temple inscriptions; and sociologists and anthropologists do extended fieldwork in the locations they study.

• The judgment on one’s scholarly work comes principally from one’s colleagues—first, before it is published, as part of the peer-review process practiced by professional journals and book publishers, and then, once it is in print, by how often the work is cited.

• There is a distinction to be drawn between intellectuals and ideologues, who are more interested in promoting their political or religious beliefs than in contributing to the growth of knowledge.

• The distinction between an ideologue and an intellectual is not absolute, yet is worth emphasising. For, unlike intellectuals, ideologues care little about the reception of their work by scholars. They wish to influence not so much the course of knowledge as the course of social or political change.

• If I was to draw up a list of the most highly regarded Indian historians of my generation, the names of Seema Alavi, Shahid Amin, Nayanjot Lahiri, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Janaki Nair, Chetan Singh, Upinder Singh and AR Venkatachalapathy would certainly figure.

• Turn next to the discipline of political science. Here, the most influential scholars working in India today include Rajeev Bhargava, Peter DeSouza, Zoya Hasan, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Gurpreet Mahajan, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Suhas Palshikar and Valerian Rodrigues.

• Move to sociology, and much the same can be said of Amita Baviskar, Dipankar Gupta, Surinder Jodhka, Nandini Sundar, AR Vasavi and Susan Visvanathan, who are some of the more respected Indian scholars now active in this field.

• If we define the “left-wing” position here as preferring a greater role in the economy for the state and the “right-wing” one as favouring the market, there has undoubtedly been a shift towards the latter tendency in recent years.

• Economics is the most technical of the social sciences, relying heavily on quantitative methods of analysis. The political or philosophical orientations of economists are, therefore, much more understated than those of sociologists or historians.

• Bhagwati’s disenchantment with the welfare-first, subsidy-oriented economic policies of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance regime, and of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council in particular, led him to support Narendra Modi and the BJP, whom he saw as more sympathetic to entrepreneurship, innovation and economic growth. However, despite his long-standing and consistent orientation towards market liberalisation, Bhagwati remains a great admirer of Jawaharlal Nehru, whose commitment to religious and social pluralism he shares.

• To be sure, there are influential columnists in the Indian media who would be happy to own the labels “conservative” and “right-wing.” Yet their output is restricted to thousand-word columns and fleeting sound bites on television, neither of which is congenial to subtle or substantial arguments about history, politics and society.

• Perhaps the only serious intellectual in India who is also socially conservative is Arun Shourie. Unlike Sudershan Rao or Dina Nath Batra, or indeed the right-wing columnists referred to above, Shourie has published a number of books based on original research.

• Mannheim argued that liberalism was a rationalist response to the religious fervour of the late Middle Ages. It sought a “dynamic middle course” between feudal oppression and the “vindictivenness of oppressed strata” that religiously oriented rebels represented.

• The conservative critique of liberalism is that it lacks concreteness. Conservatives focus not on possible futures but on life as it is actually lived.

• As for socialism, like liberalism it works towards and looks forward to a future where freedom and equality have been established. But whereas liberalism’s orientation is gradualistic, socialism actively seeks the breakdown of the capitalist order.

• Mannheim wrote that “For conservatism everything that exists has a positive and nominal value merely because it has come into existence slowly and gradually.”

• Consequently, “not only is attention turned to the past and the attempt made to rescue it from oblivion, but the presentness and immediacy of the whole past becomes an actual experience.”

• And while liberalism is resolutely anti-utopian, many socialists believe that they can construct a perfect society in the future.

• For Scruton, the starting point of conservatism is the sentiment that “good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.” The “good things” that he believes Britain should conserve are “peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life.”

• At the same time, he argues, in opposition to other conservatives, that reason and law rather than faith or religion should guide public affairs.

• Scruton thinks conservatives should accept and endorse the fundamental premise of post-Enlightenment thought: “the radical distinction between religious and political order, and the need to build the art of government without depending on the law of God.”

• Scruton’s model conservative is the eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke, who “made the case for a society shaped from below, by traditions that have grown from our natural need to associate,” rather than from above, imposed by a powerful state and an all-knowing political elite.

• Conservatism, Scruton continues, rests on acquiring and affirming “a first-person plural—a place, a community and a way of life that is ‘ours.‘”

• He argues that “it is not for the state to impose religion on the citizen or to require doctrinal conformity,” for “religious obedience is not a necessary part of citizenship, and in any conflict it is the duties of the citizen, and not those of the believer, that must prevail.”

• “Unless and until people identify themselves with the country,” Scruton writes, “its territory and its cultural inheritance—in something like the way people identify themselves with a family—the politics of compromise [necessary for democratic functioning] will not emerge.”

• Applying Scruton’s model to India immediately poses a fundamental problem. What, here, is the first-person plural? Does the “we” of Indian-ness include Indian Muslims and Indian Christians acting and thinking as Muslims and Christians?

• For him, British Muslims and British Hindus do not have to convert to Christianity, or even acknowledge its primacy in national life.

• Thus VD Savarkar’s famous distinction between pitrabhumi and punyabhumi: between the land of our fathers and the land sacred to our faith. For Savarkar, the two coincided for India’s Hindus and Sikhs, but not for its Muslims and Christians.

• For British conservatives such as Scruton, the dominant religion is merely one of several factors in nurturing a national ethos. For the Indian conservative, on the other hand, religious affiliation is both constitutive and definitive, and only Hindus, Sikhs and Jains are seen here as true or thoroughbred members of the national community.

• As the historian Dharma Kumar once pointed out, this Hindu-first and Hindu-foremost model of citizenship mimicked the political theology of medieval Islam, under which only Muslims could be full-blooded citizens of the state.

• Notably, through the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, the first-person plural for Indian conservatives excluded untouchables as well as Muslims and Christians

• The persistence of Gandhi’s campaign against untouchability, and the emergence of an even more radical critique of caste articulated by BR Ambedkar, finally led that conservative bastion to crumble, at least in intellectual and ideological terms.

• The more hard-line conservatives believe that followers of these two faiths can never be trusted. Hence the sporadic campaigns to convert—or, as the propagandists would have it, “re-convert”—Muslims and Christians to Hinduism.

• In his 2004 book Who Are We?, the political scientist Samuel Huntington defined what he called the “American Creed,” whose constituent elements are “the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy and music.”

• In the modern Indian variety of conservatism, religion plays an even more hegemonic role than in the American or Protestant variety.

• For European or American conservatives, the love of one’s country does not necessarily exclude the possibility of absorbing cultural influences, or even human migrants, from other countries or continents. The nationalism of the Hindu conservative, on the other hand, is a curious combination of xenophobia and triumphalism.

• Representative here are the views of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of the Jana Sangh. In a talk in Bilaspur in December 1944, Mookerjee insisted that a reassertion of Hinduism will “not only bring relief to the suffering millions of India but to the rest of the world as well.”

• Hindu conservatism tends to be revivalist, harking back to a pure past uncontaminated by foreign influences or alien faiths. Meanwhile, Hindu nationalism tends to be triumphalist, seeking to remake other nations and cultures in its own image.

• TO UNDERSTAND why conservative scholars are so scarce in India, let me flip the question to ask why liberal and socialist traditions have been so dominant in the intellectual life of the country.

• In this scenario of alien rule and endemic poverty, Indian social scientists naturally looked forward rather than back, to a time when they and their country would be free, and India would stand as a nation of equal citizens. In Mannheimian terms, liberalism and socialism were far more attractive in twentieth-century India than conservatism.

• Rather than keep what they had, which was colonial rule and poverty, Indian intellectuals wished to shape and create a world free of political oppression and social discrimination.

• To this line of liberal and left-wing thinker-activists there was arguably only one conservative counterpart: VD Savarkar, a man who posthumously emerged as an icon of the Hindu right, but in fact spent his last decades in obscurity.

• Tagore’s searing critiques of nationalism made Indian intellectuals less xenophobic in their approach to the world. Like the poet, they came to believe that they should glory in the illumination of a lamp lit anywhere in the world.

• In 1930, DR Gadgil, an admirer of Gokhale and a friend of Ambedkar’s, established India’s first centre for social-science research, the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics. A year later, PC Mahalanobis, who was close to both Tagore and Nehru, established the Indian Statistical Institute, which coordinated the writing of the Five Year Plans in independent India. In 1949, VKRV Rao, a Cambridge-trained economist who admired Gandhi and Nehru, set up the Delhi School of Economics, the country’s premier teaching and research centre for economists. (With the establishment of a department of sociology, in 1959, the Delhi School became India’s leading centre for that discipline as well.) In 1963, Rajni Kothari, a friend of Jayaprakash Narayan, set up the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, which has since become recognised as the country’s premier research centre for political science.

• Among the most influential of them were Gopal Krishna Gokhale, a classical liberal reared on John Stuart Mill and John Morley, who urged the British to grant to Indians the same democratic liberties their own people enjoyed; Jawaharlal Nehru, a modernising socialist influenced both by the Russian Revolution and by British Fabian thought; BR Ambedkar, an economist and legal theorist educated at those two bastions of progressive thought, Columbia University and the London School of Economics; Ram Manohar Lohia, who received a PhD in political science from Berlin, and whose personal experience of Nazi brutality made him a socialist for life; and Jayaprakash Narayan, whose experience of studying and working in the United States during the Depression oriented him towards the left.

• The apparent achievements of Soviet industrialisation, that allowed the Russians to beat the Germans in battle and the Americans in the race to space; the success of a peasant-led revolution in neighbouring China; the stirring call to action in the economic and sociological writings of Marx himself; the manifest class inequalities within India; the electoral successes of Communist parties in Kerala and West Bengal—all played a part in this.

• Marxist influence was most marked in the discipline of history, in part due to the pioneering works of the polymath and scholar DD Kosambi

• One might, with only slight exaggeration, characterise the intellectual history of independent India as a struggle for space and influence between liberals and leftists. Some centres, such as the Delhi School of Economics, were dominated by liberals; others, such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, by Marxists.

• Altogether missing from these debates were the voices of conservatives. For, while disagreeing among themselves, liberals, Marxists and socialists between them dominated intellectual life in independent India.

• These scholars, who came to prominence before and soon after Independence, in turn trained and nurtured younger generations of liberals and socialists.

• Newly free of colonial shackles, India and Indians were restless, determined to modernise and industrialise, to spread ideas of reason and rationality, to eliminate social backwardness, and caste prejudice in particular, to end poverty, and rural poverty in particular. The future beckoned; the past stood in the way.

• In How to Be a Conservative, Roger Scruton claims that “in Britain and America some 70 per cent of academics identify themselves as ‘on the left.‘”

• In the leading academic institutions of the United States and the United Kingdom, conservative intellectuals see themselves as being under siege.

• Here, conservatives do not even have the consolation of being in a significant minority. They are not just marginal, but are, often, absent altogether.

• I NOW ASK: were there ever any influential conservative intellectuals in India?

• The answer must be a qualified yes. Three names come to mind: the historians Ramesh Chandra Majumdar and Radha Kumud Mookerji, and the sociologist GS Ghurye.

• Born in 1888, RC Majumdar had a long and active professional career. His doctoral thesis, published in 1918, was based on the premise that the spirit of cooperation is very important in the life of a nation.

• In the 1950s, when he was approaching the age of 70, Majumdar turned his attention to the modern period. The fruit of his labour was History of the Freedom Movement in India, published in 1962.

• The official history of the freedom movement starts with the premise that India lost independence only in the eighteenth century and had thus an experience of subjection to a foreign power for only two centuries. Real history, on the other hand, teaches us that the major part of India lost independence about five centuries before, and merely changed masters in the eighteenth century.¹

• In the 1950s, he curated and edited a book series entitled “The History and Culture of the Indian People.” These presented Indian culture as having reached its apogee during the ancient period, and as having had its integrity and vitality hurt first by Muslim invaders and then by the British.

• Islam first arrived in India via Arab traders; thus the “Mapilla” Muslims of Kerala, a community that dates to at least the eighth century. The Turkish and Central Asian invaders who came later to northern India could be brutal, yet the Hindus who converted to Islam in the medieval period did not necessarily do so in order to escape death or persecution.

• Often the converts were from the low castes, and saw in the comparatively communitarian ethos of Islam an attractive alternative to the rigid hierarchies of Hinduism.

• Other nationalists went so far as to speak of a “composite culture,” whereby, after the first shock of invasion, Hindus and Muslims collaborated in the running of the state, in the making of great works of art and architecture, and, perhaps most of all, in the sphere of Indian classical music. This cultural fusion was said to be most fully elaborated in north India—hence the term Ganga–Jamni tehzeeb, denoting the syncretic culture said to have flourished in the lands watered by the Ganga and the Jamuna.

• BEFORE RC MAJUMDAR CHALLENGED this thesis of a composite culture, another Bengali historian of ancient India did likewise. This was Radha Kumud Mookerji

• But perhaps his most powerful historiographical intervention was a short study—something between a pamphlet and a book—entitled The Fundamental Unity of India

• The Fundamental Unity of India had as its principal target the claim that political unity in India was largely or solely a creation of British rule. But it also had a secondary target; namely, the growing belief among nationalists that a future Indian nation-state should-—in view of the large existing Muslim population—not be built on Hindu principles alone.

• For Mookerji, the consciousness of Indian nationhood pre-dated arrivals of both the British and the Muslims. Thus he remarks that the “Rishis of old” coined the name Bharatavarsha to describe the whole of India. This name derived from Bharata, a historical hero who, Mookerji claims, was to India what Romulus was to Rome.

• This ancient national consciousness was furthered by Sankara, who, in the eighth century, established four places of pilgrimage—Badrinath-Kedarnath in the north, Rameshwaram in the south, Dwaraka in the west and Puri in the east—“so that the entire country may be known by the people and the whole area held sacred.”

• The practice of pilgrimage, Mookerji claims, allows no parochial, provincial sense to grow up which might interfere with the growth of the idea of the geographical unity of the mighty motherland; allowed no sense of physical comforts to stand in the way of the sacred duty of intimately knowing one’s mother country; and softened the severities of old-world travelling by breaking the pilgrim’s route by a holy halting place at short intervals.

• Yet the ancient monarchs he mentions had little presence in this territory’s south, and were largely absent from its west as well.

• These examples and illustrations confirm—to Mookerji, at any rate—that “early Hindu history unmistakably shows that the political consciousness of the people had from very early times grasped the whole of India as a unity.”

• He makes the extravagant claim that “history records the names of many Indian rulers who succeeded in realising their ambition of establishing a suzerainty over the whole of India”—Harshavardhana, Samudra Gupta, Chandragupta and Ashoka were for him examples of such rulers.

• Sanskrit was spoken or understood only by the priestly elite; the hymns Mookerji saw as emblematic of national unity would have been unknown or incomprehensible to the majority of the population.

• The first-person plural in Mookerjee’s political philosophy is strictly (and narrowly) defined by religion.

• In a series of monographs and pamphlets written in the 1930s and 1940s, Elwin argued that the tribes of central India were culturally distinct from Hindus. Although their pantheon occasionally included Hindu gods, their society was not internally stratified by caste, while women had far more independence.

• Rather than see tribal groups as autonomous and distinct, Ghurye argues that they are “the imperfectly integrated classes of Hindu society.”

• In 1954, after two decades living with and writing about the tribes of the Indian peninsula, Elwin moved to the north-east of the country. Now an Indian citizen, he was appointed an advisor to the administration of the North-East Frontier Agency—present-day Arunachal Pradesh

• Elwin, Ghurye claims, had willy-nilly collaborated in the “balkanisation of Bharat,” in the potential sundering into pieces of the motherland.

• The fear of diversity masked as a plea for national unity—this is a classically conservative trope, also manifest, for example, in the suspicion of Spanish-speaking immigrants among US conservatives, or of Arabic-speaking immigrants in Europe.

• This raises the question: why did India have prominent conservative intellectuals while under alien rule, and why has it seen so few of them (if any) since?

• Here is a possible answer. In the late colonial period, as the nationalist movement took shape, there were intense political and intellectual debates on the possible contours of the future nation: whether the political institutions of a free India would be defined by a single religion, or many religions, or by no religion at all; how linguistic and ethnic diversity would be managed. After Independence, however, these debates were foreclosed by the political, and in time institutional, victory of the liberal and socialist viewpoints, whose most charismatic and influential advocate was India’s first and longest-serving prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

• Notably, his most articulate critics were to the left of the ruling Congress Party. They included the socialists Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan, and the communist EMS Namboodiripad

• The more general mood also favoured liberals and socialists, for a new nation wished to look forward, to leave behind the detritus of tradition and colonialism in constructing a fair and just society.

• If the situation of the Congress is dire, that of the Communists is disastrous.

• Also bleak is the political future of the socialist parties that once commanded much influence in north and east India. No longer motivated by the ideas of Lohia or Narayan, they are now vehicles for individual or familial ambition.

• The phenomenon of right-wing political dominance without an intellectual ecosystem to support it is not unknown in modern history. It was prevalent, for example, in some countries in inter-war Europe and post-war Latin America, and, most recently, in the decade-long rule of Mahinda Rajapaksa and his party in Sri Lanka.

• Thus the oft-expressed wish that the BJP become more like the Christian Democrats of Germany or the Republicans of the United States—namely, a conservative party that stops some distance short of being chauvinist or reactionary. If this softening of the BJP were to happen, then the party would—like its counterparts in the West—have to find or nurture a cast of serious scholars and thinkers on the right.

• As I see it, the precondition for a conservative intellectual renaissance must be the construction of a first-person plural which is not based on religion alone.

• A major hurdle to the growth of this non-denominational conservatism is the massive influence currently exercised by the RSS over the political landscape

• Here, then, is a difficult but necessary task for prospective conservative intellectuals: to detach their ideas from those of the RSS. For the Sangh and its ideologues represent not conservatism, but bigotry and reaction.

• To seek equal citizenship for Muslims and other religious minorities one need not nostalgically evoke the old nationalist idea of the “composite culture.” There never was a pure past of complete harmony, as the proponents of Ganga-Jamni tehzeeb would have us believe.

• Nehru’s prescription was—the pun is inescapable—absolutely right.

• Proud patriots on the right shall be offended by my praise of a white Englishman, Scruton, and of an Anglicised Indian, Nehru. So let me now turn indigenous. If Indian conservatives are looking for a historical role model from within India itself, they need look no further than C Rajagopalachari

• Increasingly disenchanted with the socialist policies of Nehru, Rajaji left the Congress. In 1959, he started an organisation of his own, called the Swatantra Party, which stood for radically reducing the state’s control over the economy, and over other aspects of social life.

• Speaking more generally, Rajaji argued that “the role of the Government should be that of a catalyst in stimulating economic development while individual initiative and enterprise are given fullest play.”

• Nehru dismissed Rajaji’s economic ideas as out of date, but in fact they anticipated the trends of the future.

• Himself an Iyengar Brahmin, in a famous case in 1924 he defended a panchama—the term then current for untouchables in Madras—who had gone to a temple to pray but was cast out by the priests for allegedly defiling a sacred space.

• In September 1947, he was governor of West Bengal when Gandhi went on a fast to stop the Hindu–Muslim violence then raging in Calcutta.

• Like his mentor Gandhi, Rajaji cannot be easily pigeon-holed into the convenient labels of modern political thought.Was he liberal, conservative, or socialist? As I have said elsewhere, if forced to choose, one would have to call him a conservative (lower case): but still, a rather special kind of conservative.

• Although he was religious, and conservative, he was not conformist.

• He had the true conservative’s trait of combining scepticism about what man-made systems can do for human nature with the personal kindliness to individuals which socialists, dealing with human beings as statistical groups and abstractions, sometimes lack.

• After meeting Nehru in Delhi, Abdullah travelled to Madras to meet Rajaji. To the Kashmiri patriot, Rajaji presented a proposal that would allow Jammu to remain in India, Azad Kashmir to stay in Pakistan, and the Valley—the crucial bone of contention—to be jointly administered by both countries with assistance from the United Nations.

• The Sheikh then took what became known as the “Rajaji Formula” to Nehru, and, following his approval, headed across the border to discuss it with Pakistan’s leaders. Nehru died while the discussions were on, and the hopes of a permanent settlement over Kashmir died with him.

• The conclusion is inescapable: there can be a credible conservative intellectual tradition in India only if it emerges outside the ecosystem of the Sangh Parivar. Rather than the liberals and leftists whom they currently target, self-aware and self-conscious conservatives should really be vigilant of the reactionaries who dominate the discourse on the right.

Footnotes

1. From R. C. Majumdar’s History of the Freedom Movement in India ↩